ByteDance’s management philosophy

Everyone is a product manager

Editor’s introduction: ByteDance currently has 20 products that can be named, have apps, and have formed businesses. One company has been established for 8 years. Once the company's 20 products are launched, they have strong market competitiveness. This is indeed a model of the era of hot products. In the past eight years, ByteDance has grown from a few dozen people to 60,000 people. The author of this article shares with you the management philosophy of ByteDance.

1. The "inaction" management model

After studying the company ByteDance, someone discovered a very strange phenomenon: this company has no management.

A company with 60,000 people has no management, wouldn’t it be a mess?

It is true that ByteDance is in such an out-of-control state. But just like Zhuangzi's inaction, Bytedance is using an invisible force to manage the company. Specifically, it can be reflected in the following points.

1. OKR management

OKR management is the abbreviation of "Objectives" and "Key Results" in English, that is, Objectives and Key Results.

Goals first, then key results. OKR, as a management tool, originated from Intel, was carried forward by Google, and is now implemented all over the world, mainly in Internet high-tech companies.

Drucker once said: Real management is not managed by managers, but managed by goals.

The management chaos of many companies is not because there are no managers, nor because there is no management system, but because their goals are particularly unclear; when there are no clear goals, everyone’s busyness becomes performance work dance, engaging in loyal competition; the results are also very poor. So real management is called MBO, that is, Management By Objective, which means management by objectives.

OKR inherits this idea, which leads employees to activate their initiative through clear goals instead of doing nothing every day.

Using OKR is to use invisible and invisible hands to manage, rather than using visible hands, visible levels, and visible systems to manage.

Back to ByteDance, Zhang Lidong is the newly appointed CEO of Toutiao China. There is a short story about him.

Once, he was going to India to inspect the Indian market. After he went there, he was stopped at the customs because there was a problem with his visa. When Zhang Yiming called him, he thought he was already in India. He said I was in the office because I was intercepted. Another week later, Zhang Yiming called him again. He said that he had traveled to several places in India and had discussed several cooperations.

How did he do it? in spite of. This is ByteDance's inaction management, where goals and key results are the ones that receive the most attention.

So the author is very surprised that ByteDance has something that many companies dare not do, that is, there is no attendance check.

2. De-hierarchical company culture

ByteDance also has a company culture that deeply affects employees, and that is de-hierarchy. That is to say, in Byte, no one is allowed to call him the president, or even the teacher. Everyone calls him by his first name.

Does this sound rude? In fact, this is not the case. Nowadays, more and more companies are trying to change a company's management culture and management structure starting from titles and titles.

Lenovo has made such efforts very early. In Yang Yuanqing’s company, everyone calls him Yuanqing, not Mr. Yang; Alibaba can be said to have gone further in this regard, using Hua Names replace ranks and titles, adding interest and shortening the distance between people.

But ByteDance has gone even more extreme. They simply don’t need all of these and just call them by their names. The culture of many companies is written as slogans and hung on the wall, but in this company, as soon as you walk into the company, you can feel this kind of equal, title-free, and hierarchical culture.

3. Context, not Control

ByteDance has a slogan called "Context, not Control". Context is context, context, and scene.

When the author was working in a small foreign company last year, the most difficult thing about our work communication was that there was no context, and there was no contextual background. The difficulty of communication cannot be easily described, and the blame-shifting that followed It’s all commonplace;

As products, we are more often responsible for taking the blame. After I couldn't bear it anymore, I quit. It was really not suitable for me to struggle in such chaotic meetings and work without context.

So when I first learned about ByteDance’s slogan, I really felt the same way. Context, No Control is a supreme management philosophy and company culture, which explains why some people say that ByteDance has no management. In fact, it is not a top-down design and control, but a bottom-up one. evolution and growth.

This can be said to be a very important reason for ByteDance’s rapid growth. Some people say that Tencent is crawling and Byte is beating. The author believes that the driving force comes from this "Context, not Control".

2. Hidden business under hidden capabilities and resources

This part will start with the familiar Feishu launched by ByteDance. Feishu is called Lark in English, which means It is a lark or a skylark, and it also means playing games; although this management software does not look like management software, but has a certain game color, its biggest feature, the positioning given to it by Byte, is Communication and collaboration efficiency.

Here I will not talk about the competition with DingTalk, but will focus more on the business significance behind the process from 0 to 1. Later, I will publish an article objectively analyzing its market performance and the problems that emerged in the competition with DingTalk. Weakness and more.

Feishu 1.0 was launched in July 2017 and was promoted internally by Byte three months later. In less than two years, in June 2019, Feishu officially became a product, carrying ByteDance’s genes and riding the waves in the capital market.

Situations similar to Feishu are not unique within Bytedance. As for why a software used internally can be commercialized, and why JD.com’s Jingme is still used internally and not promoted to the market, let us Explore the capabilities and business behind it.

1. Hidden capabilities and resources of enterprises

As a person and as an organization, our capabilities and resources can be divided into explicit and implicit capabilities.

Abilities can be divided into explicit abilities and hidden abilities, and resources can also be divided into explicit resources and hidden resources.

This implicit ability and resource is often priceless:

Since it does not enter the transaction, it has no clear price;

It contains The value is inestimable and therefore priceless.

Here is an example: Polanyi's paradox tells us that we always know more than we know we know, and what we know is greater than what we know we know.

For example: We are all using the Internet today, have you ever wondered who invented it? It seems that the U.S. Department of Defense invented this kind of thing in 1969. In fact, that thing is of little use. It just connects various LANs. Its biggest function is basically sending emails. It cannot browse the web, switch from one LAN to another quickly, or switch from one site to another. Another site. It is equivalent to an information line, which we ordinary people cannot use.

We owe our use of the Internet today to a man named Berners-Lee.

He is a physicist who works at the European Institute of Physics in Switzerland. In addition to studying physics, he also has good computer skills. The institution where he works is a semi-virtual one, and every year some people do research in this place, but after a while they return to their respective places. Therefore, this research institution has a very important task, which is to quickly contact all non-staff researchers. Here, checking business cards and contact information has become a very important thing, but for a long time no one thought of improving the process of this matter.

In order to facilitate his communication, Berners-Lee made some small inventions, which he thought were small inventions.

He invented two technologies:

One technology is that all LANs are connected to each other. A computer in this LAN can freely communicate with a computer in another LAN. Computer connection, he named it World Wide Web, the abbreviation is WWW;

Another technology is the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which also aims to solve the problem of free switching of individual terminals between local area networks. In fact, Browse freely, the abbreviation of Hypertext Transfer Protocol is Http.

In 1991, it was because of these two technologies that the Internet in the past became the World Wide Web, and the Internet officially appeared.

Someone has estimated that if Berners-Lee collected patent fees, he would be a trillionaire. Of course, he later received a bonus of US$100,000, but he donated the bonus because he felt that he had made it smoothly.

This example shows that in addition to everyone's abilities, there may be some hidden abilities. Since this ability is not used in transactions, it cannot become a business; its initial cost is very low. , but its ultimate utility may be high. Of course, it is also possible that it is submerged there. If there are no scenarios or applications, it will have no economic value.

2. Hidden business

We are all saying that we have entered the cloud era.

The global cloud industry now has three giants AAA, namely Amazon, Alibaba, and Microsoft (Microsoft's cloud is called Azure cloud).

Why can Alibaba become Alibaba Cloud?

To a considerable extent, the capabilities and resources it needs to build a cloud have already been developed before it even thought of building a cloud, and it has already achieved initial results. During the peak trading period similar to Double Eleven, in order to ensure stability, the entire backend support network must be very powerful. However, after the peak, the resources and capabilities become somewhat idle, and the excess resources and capabilities are Some kind of market may be formed for trading.

In fact, both Alipay and Alibaba Cloud came into being to solve internal problems. However, when this kind of hidden business that strives for excellence grows to a certain size and is made public to the market, it is tantamount to being a king. Come like that.

The same goes for Microsoft. It took four years to go from a company with a market value of more than 200 billion US dollars to more than one trillion US dollars, and once again became the technology company with the highest market value, relying on its cloud business. .

In the ten years since it lost the PC era, Microsoft has been doing one thing, unconsciously at first, and then consciously, and that is cloud business.

Microsoft's current CEO Satya said in his autobiography: "The cloud business has taught me a series of lessons that I must keep in mind in the future. The most important one is that leaders must simultaneously look at Be aware of external opportunities and internal capabilities and culture, and all the connections between them, and be the first to react to such insights before they become common knowledge.”

From a hidden business to a business. Planting an explicit business, on the one hand, grows naturally, but on the other hand, having seeds does not mean there will be a good harvest, and a lot of effort is required.

As seed abilities and seed resources, this kind of hidden ability and hidden resources requires a lot of energy to sow, cultivate, water and fertilize, so that the hidden business can become a real business. Business that appears out of nowhere in the eyes of others.

This is a common rule for all startups and mature companies to launch new businesses:

A new thing is not brand new. From 0 to 1, those who know it know that it is actually a process from 1 to N, at least from 0.5 to 1, and then from 1 to N again.

In Satya’s words: You have already started doing this before this insight became known to everyone.

3. Exploring the unknown

There is a popular saying recently, called creating a second curve.

According to teacher Wu Bofan’s point of view, many companies’ so-called second curve cultivation has two fatal weaknesses:

The so-called second curve is a well-known insight. In fact, it can no longer be called insight.

When I see an opportunity, I start to build this business again. At this time, you are starting from scratch, and it is very likely that you will never achieve zero breakthrough.

The most fatal thing is that many companies start the so-called cultivation of the second curve, thinking about opening up a new business when the company's existing business is no longer good and has begun to decline.

The characteristic of hidden business is: when you are engaged in core business and want to make it the best, you already have those resources and capabilities unintentionally. The exploratory management style is called hesitant strategy in Bezos’ words. It adopts a trial-and-error attitude towards a thing or a business, and tries its best, even if it gets a relatively small return, or even does not make a profit for a long time, as long as it can keep the company running, it must persevere.

If you insist on what others can’t or can’t persist, you will win. ByteDance has once again proved this conclusion.

3. The Secret of Dubu Wulin: Delayed Gratification

Finally, let’s look back at ByteDance. ByteDance’s business form today is somewhat similar to that of Dubu Wulin. A company is born With so many businesses, new businesses will be generated over time. It is not a second curve. It has a mechanism to generate hidden businesses.

This mechanism is closely related to the company's core business philosophy. In Zhang Yiming’s words, this business philosophy is called delayed gratification.

The concept of "delayed gratification" was proposed in "The Road Less Traveled".

Delayed gratification includes two aspects:

You are not in a hurry to get the benefits you can get, but you use your advantages and benefits in a controlled manner;

You have to do it even if there is no immediate reward or benefit.

Since Zhang Yiming started his business, he has always emphasized delayed gratification. We think this is chicken soup for the soul, but in fact it is a business philosophy.

Not long after its establishment, Byte has shown strong growth. Some people made big bets to invest but were rejected by Zhang Yiming. He believes that the most important thing for a company is to keep the possibilities large enough, and then the reality, that is, the things that can be realized, should be as restrained and as small as possible.

The business philosophy of secretly accumulating assets as much as possible and realizing them prudently and sparingly is, in a nutshell, delayed gratification.

It is this kind of attitude that can ensure that a company has a mechanism to continuously generate hidden business, thereby ensuring that new curves will continue to grow on the company's operating curve. 20200719